I wouldn't bank on professionals being technical. The desktop has tons of use in the white collar space which is full of people all over the spectrum of technical literacy, but also specialty.
Same way Firefox does. Trade marks. They want to protect the reputation of their trade marks, that is enforceable, and then they can let people fork to their hearts content (waterfox, iceweasle, librewolf, the tor browser, etc).
The container concept is super useful for with CI/CD tools. So I could update my config have it spin up just the layers I care about run tests and if it passes then switch out the old piece of the running system.
Make it easy enough and you can get users testing super bespoke systems and possibly sharing the results with others helping catch the edge cases sooner.
At least that is part of my dream on it. Of user oriented distributed systems is also something I've worked towards here and there.
There is a lot of cool federated learning frameworks, federated inference seems less fleshed out with petals.dev being the only example I know of for it.
How good is nix system config to OCI container? I really need to get my hands on it more, because that seems like a good experience to me. Maybe even use it as a build system for OCI/k8s config map generator/k8s manifest builder so I can define a system and build out the pieces needed to deploy on distributed system if need be.
Btrfs and Ostree definitely are different approaches to the problem. Btrfs has all the benefits you mentioned (cow filesystems and snapshots are just awesome) but it doesn't support the system layers like Ostree does. So you can't easily export a btrfs system into a container for example or rebase your OS on a new image.
To me both a super useful together too but covering different domains, everything mutable needs a backup and recovery method too, even on an Ostree system.
Stuff like guix and nix also cover a lot of these domains too (or can at least), but still leave stuff like user data as an exercise for the system admin to handle (though an exercise you can use guix/nix to configure something like btrfs to handle!).
I do really like the portals system included in flatpak, plus OCI just has wider support (and tooling) then nix and guix atm. They are both, in my eyes, the next part of the dream of a fully defined system though, so I expect the tooling and support to keep growing!
It also takes the fun out of mischievous rule breaking/bending if you are the sort that likes to push boundaries. It's an acknowledgement of the cat and mouse game and a meta ask to not play it here, implying the other player won't find it fun.
Again only works for good faith actors.
I say this as a guy who can't help but think of rules lawyering to see what could technically be done within them.
The fact that apps can be deployed at different paces definitely is a real double edged sword. On one hand it prevent an app who prioritizes a fix low on the list from slowing down other apps on the same system, meaning everything should be able to update ASAP. It also means that the slower updating ones have less community/business pressure telling them to get fixed.
Might be able to run URLCheck with some Android on Linux tools and set that as the default browser. Less sure about how to get it to send it to the destination app.
Ahh tracking. I've never seen a work flow that used data flowing well between MS products. I've never had an incompatibility issue yet either, but I believe it, certainly on excel, that program can be a beast.
Except not proprietary and solely owned by a FAANG company.